Actually I can't reproduce this. It seems to remember the last solid color I used. (When drawing rectangles at least.)
Jasper, my bad. I tried with a recent compilation and it doesn't do that anymore. However, the opacity=0 is still inherited when you creat an object with that opacity, and that doesn't make much sense, imo.
Imagine being used to drawing an object, changing its style, then drawing another object and seeing that it has the same look as the earlier shape. Wouldn't it then be very weird if opacity was NOT remembered? You'd then probably get bug reports (again) about how new shapes have a different color from previous shapes, etc., etc.
As far as I could see, most of the users doesn't consider the opacity as one of the atributes of the color. Opacity is considered commonly as an extra property, and not part of the color. That's why several users think their colors look "pale" when they're actually semi-transparent. The alpha value is commonly misinterpreted as a "tint" value. People use it when they want to make the color lighter, not transparent. Of course you have the HSL sliders and you can do a sort of tinting raising the value of the L slider. But both opacity and tinting are commonly applied as transformations over the color, not coloring itself. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that they aren't related to the color mixing, but people usually tend to see them as some kind of post-processing over the color. For instance, they take a red swatch and want to have tints of that red swatch. They don't look for a pink swatch with the same hue than the red swatch. That's why I think that opacity is commonly mistaken as tinting.
It would be ten times nicer if we could simply make it more obvious what's going on, and make things more consistent (in one of the bug reports the confusion started because paths behaved differently from shapes for example).
Yes, I agree. But how? What I mentioned is my idea of a fast workaround to avoid a common usage mistake. Of course it would be much better if we find a better way to make it clearer. But that would take some work, and my suggestion was intended to work around the issue, in the most elegant way possible.